Unagi

The Eel, Imamura’s first film since Black Rain (1989), won a Golden Palm at the Cannes festival. The prologue is characteristic of Imamura. When Yamashita, an office worker with a passion for nocturnal angling trips, hears that his wife has a lover, he stabs her and turns himself in to the police. The story starts when Yamashita is released from jail. This taciturn man, who really only talks to an eel he ‘made friends with’ in jail, is taken to a small town by a river by the probation service. He starts a hairdressing salon and is slowly accepted into the small community. One day he finds an unconscious woman who has tried to commit suicide. This Keiko reminds him of his wife. She comes to help him in the hairdressing salon, but despite her obvious advances, he keeps her at a distance.The sober realism with which Imamura sketches the return of his protagonist into society, is exchanged in the second half of the film for a much more complex amalgam of styles. The supporting characters become more and more weird and all kinds of hidden emotions are forced to the surface, resulting in several fantastic slapstick scenes. Imamura sketches a portrait of a small community around the metaphor of an eel that, born in the beautiful Sargasso Sea, swims thousands of miles to live somewhere in the cold mud.